Promise to raise your children with standards at least as high as what society expects from them in terms of courtesy, judgment, work ethic, and morality—which, if American society is the measuring stick, should not be too high a bar to hurdle. Caroline let her adult kids run roughshod over her husband Theo, which meant that he could not do anything to rein in their disrespectful and abusive behavior.
27.
Ask yourselves, “If we had teenage kids right now, with our current attitudes toward discipline and parenting, how likely would the police chief of our town know us on a first-name basis by how often our kids were in the back of a squad car?” Diane and Clayton were on the same page as far as parenting was concerned, but the catch was that they were overly permissive. Even as they sat in my office, they allowed their four-year-old son to dribble his basketball clumsily around my waiting room, nearly breaking several of my items and not obeying his parents’ suggestion to sit down and behave.
28.
It’s at least as bad to take over all the parenting decisions as it is to abandon all of them. Garrett was expected to be the de facto parent of Stacie’s six children, but he was nothing more than a cash register, in Stacie’s opinion. She did not compel her children to respect him, nor did she give Garrett any authority to pressure her youngest son Kody to improve his grades.
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